


Seeing Double

by plinys



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: 5 Things, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 21:04:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15916218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: “Sara?”It really is a tell of how often this had happened that Ava turns at the sound of a name that is not her own.[or 5 times Ava gets mistaken for Sara by non-Legends]





	Seeing Double

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lucylikestowrite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucylikestowrite/gifts).



> this is both my 420 fic, lucy's bday gic, and my only good joke. be proud.

1

The first time it happens Ava is certain that it is a fluke. 

A random happenstance, a misunderstanding, an anachronism that she had been called to last minute. Summoned to the middle of nowhere and a lake the glowed green under the moonlight. 

And two women watching over it.

She knows them instantly, though they have no reason to know her. The Time Bureau has files on everyone connected with the Legends, and for that matter connected to  _ Team Arrow _ , which these two certainly are. 

Ava blames it on the light, low and dim, slightly green tinted. And the fact that certainly these two only know  _ one  _ time traveler that should be crossing paths with them. 

But still she can’t help but be a little shocked, when her first run in with Sara’s infamous ex-girlfriend, involves the other woman squinting at her in the low light, and saying: “Sara, you’ve gotten taller.”

  
  
  


2

This wasn’t her jurisdiction. 

Really it wasn’t. 

She shouldn’t even be interfering, but technically there was no way this would mess up all of time and she was a federal agent. Just of a very different branch than what the papers she waved in front of the security guards had claimed. 

It’s a gamble.

Probably a mistake.

But is also a favor to Sara’s friends, and really Sara was just lucky that Ava loved her enough to make this exception. (Or, at least, the thank you sex would be well worth it.)

Ava’s never met Oliver Queen. He wasn’t permitted at the funeral where Ava had met the rest of Sara’s Star City friends on account of being imprisoned for his crimes. Though Ava had read plenty of things about the infamous Green Arrow in the file that the Time Bureau kept on him… She imagined this meeting going down a lot differently.

For one thing it always involved a feeling of anxiety and the thought of Sara introducing Ava to her friends (and what was left of her family) as her girlfriend, in a setting that was most certainly not a prison holding cell.  

For another well… She imagined that he didn’t usually look like this, beaten up, one eye swollen shut, blood dried to the side of his face. Apparently the inmates at Iron Heights didn’t take too kindly to having a known vigilante in their midst.

Who would have guessed?

Getting him transferred out of here, even if she had a feeling he would never actually properly make it to his destination (something that Ava was trying really hard  _ not  _ to think about), would probably be for the best. Probably. 

For now though there was a bit of legality… Or illegality in this case.

Oliver squints at her across the table, probably the concussion, and Ava forces a smile out of obligation.

“Mr. Queen, do you know who I am?”

He shakes his head, though stops halfway through the second shake and seems to consider her for moment. His eyes are a bit fogged over and Ava’s certain now that they’re going to have to have some sort of medical professional look him over before they get him out of here.

At his silence, Ava starts to speak, only to be cut off a moment later, “I am-”

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like-”

“No,” Ava replies, voice dry, a forced smile on her lips. Because she knows  _ exactly  _ how that sentence ends, and if she hadn’t promised Sara that she would help with that she would walk out right now.  “ I am Director Sharpe, of the Federal Time Bureau.” 

“Is that a real thing?”

“Regrettably.” 

  
  
  


3

The Legends were working with Team Flash, something that Ava was pretty sure was a terrible idea because everything that the Bureau had on speedsters insisted that they did more muddling of the timeline than mending it, but technically Ava wasn’t here on Time Bureau duty.

She just happened to be in the right place and the right time. 

Or since this was the Legends, maybe more like the  _ wrong  _ place at the  _ wrong  _ time.

Which now meant she was stuck lurking around awkwardly in Star Labs waiting for Sara to return from wherever she had disappeared to. 

“So,” comes the long drawl of one of the newest members of Team Flash, somehow making the one syllable word turn into a three syllable word. She is one of the few people that the Time Bureau didn’t have an official file started on… Yet. Though Ava had a feeling that by the end of all this they certainly would. “You’re like from the Time Bureau, right?”

Ava shifts slightly. She already feels too exposed, out here in jeans and a leather jacket rather than the comforting security of her usual Time Bureau suit, having been introduced to the gathered group as  _ Sara’s girl _ .

This doesn’t make her feel any better.

“I’m sorry, who are you?”

The young woman makes a face that Ava knows all too well, the sort of comes right before a lie, the exact same facial that  _ Barry Allen  _ had made a less than an hour ago when he was insisting that it technically wasn’t his fault time was messed up again. 

Ava was beginning to hate that word:  _ technically _ .

“Doesn’t matter.”

“That’s an interesting name,” Ava replies, voice dry and unamused.

Not that her tone seems to affect the young woman, because all Ava really gets is a shrug in return. 

Ava’s not certain why she expected anything more than that.

“Hypothetically speaking-” Ah, and they were Ava’s other least favorite words, “-If someone needed like get back to the future, there’s like ways to uh… Do that, right?”

“You’re going to have to be a bit more specific,” Ava replies apprehensively. 

She gets another one of those sheepish grins in reply, “Well, see it’s kind of complicated, but supposed someone who-”

“Nora! Come over here!”

The girl falls silent at the sound of what is presumably her name, twisting away from Ava to away from Ava towards where Iris is overlooking some computer monitors with Mick Rory and at least three different versions of Harrison Wells. 

“Be right there,” she calls back, turning back to Ava just for a moment to give her a quick smile, before she goes, “Well, it was nice talking to you, Mrs. Lance!”

And definitely not listening a moment later when she corrects her, “It’s Sharpe, and it’s Director _. _ ” 

  
  
  


4

“Sara?”

It really is a tell of how often this had happens that Ava turns at the sound of a name that is not her own. But here, at Star City Town Hall, on something that is technically Time Bureau business well… The likelihood of someone knowing Sara rather than knowing who Ava was actually made sense. 

Ava turns on her heel, looking down the hallway to where the other woman stands. 

For a second Ava isn’t entirely certain what to make of the woman in front of her. Certainly she recognizes her, how could she not? The Time Bureau has a whole file folder on this woman, and the mess she’s made crossing over into this earth. (The file more of an addendum to the massive on that they have on Sara, a file that Ava has told herself that she’s forbidden from looking at  now that she and Sara are together again.)

Ava forces herself to smile a little at the woman in front of her.  This isn’t the first time that something like this has happened, and this point she has it down to an art form - “Sorry, you’re mistaken.” 

There’s a look of genuine confusion on her face. Perhaps the only  _ genuine  _ look that this Laurel has ever worn. At least, if what Sara had told her was true. 

Certainly, she played the part of the innocent and good lawyer Laurel well, but Ava was aware that she was standing face to face with the evil Earth 2 doppelganger of her girlfriend’s sister.

“No, we’ve met,” Black Siren insists. “At the funeral,” she amends in a softer tone, “I remember you were there.”

Right. 

They had briefly for a moment.

She had been there to support Sara. Even though she hadn’t known Sara’s father, or any of her gathered friends and family at the time. She had been there, somber and in black, still questioning her whole world and herself, but she had been there for Sara. Standing together in the section marked for her family, right next to the woman that was claiming to be Laurel Lance.

It would be an easy mistake for someone to make, given the fact that this Laurel had mentioned offhandedly that  _ her  _ Sara had died many years before, as no more than a child. No doubt long enough that her exact features may have been lost on the woman in front of her. 

“I’m Sara’s girlfriend,” Ava says after a moment. “Not her… It's an easy mistake to make… Apparently.”

That word still feeling a little heavy on her tongue.

_ Girlfriend _ .

But it was better than explaining all of the complications to Black Siren. 

Though a moment later when she looks Ava up in down, in a way that is clearly not meant to be  _ platonic.  _ Any softness that this Laurel had had at the site of a woman that could have been her sister, shifting into the  _ Black Siren  _ that Ava had heard stories about.

_ ,  _ Ava regrets not having held up the sister charade. 

Especially when the next thing Black Siren says, is in a tone of voice that reminds her too much of Sara, “So then we’re not related  _ and _ you’re into girls?”

  
  
  


5

The woman smiles at her in a way that is familiar to Ava. Though the face is not, the expression is. It’s a little awkward, a little forced, the sort of smile reserved for running into one night stands months later and pretending that it’s not awkward that you both recognized each other.

Only this time Ava doesn’t recognize her.

Probably due to the fact that she’s currently on a completely different earth, having been roped into helping the Legends with their transdimensional crisis just because she happened to be sleeping over at Sara’s when the Waverider literally fell out of the temporal zone.

It was  _ a lot _ .

And Ava very much would rather never be included in this nonsense ever again. 

But for now… Cleaning up the mess left by a world nearly ending… Again...

Ava tries her best to mirror the awkward smile of the woman across from her. There is something about her, vaguely familiar maybe. Or maybe it’s just the way she holds herself, like a soldier, a feeling that Ava knows all too well.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve met,” Ava tells the other woman. “Or I don’t remember it’s been a little hectic the last couple of days.”

“Yeah, I know that,” she replies. “Seems to have a habit of those. I mean, after that whole nazi invasion during that wedding and-”

“Oh,” Ava cuts her off.

Because while she definitely wasn’t there, she had heard the stories from Sara and it wasn’t hard to put two and two together.

“I’m not Sara,” Ava says. At least this one has an excuse, other worlds and all. Or the closest thing anyone has ever had. “I’m actually sort of her girlfriend.” 

This time it is the other woman’s turn to say, “Oh,”  a small hint of color rising up on her cheeks.

Ava makes a mental note not to ask Sara about who she may or may not have hooked up with at Barry and Iris’ wedding. Even if the answer was quite literally right in front of her. 

“Well, uh, I’m Alex?”

  
  
  


+1

“Sara! Hey, Sara, I-,” Nate’s hand grips too tightly to the sleeve of Ava’s jacket, as if he needs to hold onto her to steady himself. She has half the mind to shove him off, and let him fall to the ground, but she’s been trying to be  _ nice  _ the Legends, because of Sara, even at great personal cost. 

Ava pointedly shoots a glance at where Sara stands on the other side of the room. 

Stopping her investigation of the octopus statue on her desk, Sara asks, “What is it?” 

Except rather than explaining whatever it is that is on his mind, Nate sways slightly once more, knocking his shoulder into Ava’s.

When she turns to shoot him an annoyed look, she catches a sort of wide eyed confusion in his gaze. Also the hint of red around the edges of her eyes and it wouldn’t seem too far to assume that Nate was under the influence of  _ something _ . 

Especially when his voice comes out low and conspiratorial, but confused all the same, making a mistake that really Ava is tired of having to correct.  “Woah, shit, Sara, how long has there been two of you?” 


End file.
